Agents of Innocence (42 page)

Fuad said he would join in the search.

“How soon are the Israelis likely to move?” asked Fuad.

“I got this information a week ago,” answered Fares. “It could be very soon.”

When Fares had left, Fuad called Jamal’s apartment. His wife answered. Jamal wasn’t there, she said. He hadn’t come home the previous night. He must be working. Then Fuad called Jamal’s office. A bodyguard answered. No, Jamal wasn’t there. No, he didn’t know where he was. Fuad tried the health club where Jamal sometimes went in the morning. No, he hadn’t been in. He called two women who he thought might know Jamal’s whereabouts. When he asked if Jamal was there, one of them hung up. The other one laughed.

It was already nine-thirty. It was getting late. Fuad left his hotel, looking for a needle in the haystack of Beirut.

Fuad tried to put himself in the mind of an Israeli intelligence officer. If I was trying to kill Jamal Ramlawi with a car bomb, Fuad asked himself, where would I put it? Not near his office. That area was too heavily guarded by the fedayeen. The chance of getting caught was too great.

No, thought Fuad. If I was trying to kill Jamal, I would put the bomb near the Palestinian’s apartment. Or on the route between his apartment and his office. Or on the route between his apartment and his health club. Or on the route between the health club and his office.

Fuad took a taxi to the area where Jamal lived, in a district of West Beirut known as Verdun. The area was packed with cars, some parked, some honking their horns and pushing their way slowly through the morning traffic. They were going nowhere. There were thousands of cars to check and Fuad was stopped in a traffic jam. He decided it was better to leave the cab and explore the area on foot. In the crush of West Beirut, he would be able to move more quickly that way.

Fuad searched first along Rue Verdun, between Jamal’s apartment and his office. He grasped the piece of paper with the license numbers on it, by now ragged and dirty with sweat. It didn’t matter. A Ford, a Volkswagen, and a Mercedes. The license numbers of each were engraved on his brain after a few minutes. He moved as quickly as he could along Rue Verdun, checking every Ford, Volkswagen, and Mercedes he could find. Though it was January, he was sweating profusely. The check of Verdun Street took him an hour. He found nothing. None of the tags matched the ones on his list.

He ducked into a small appliance store on Rue Verdun and called Jamal’s office again. Yes, he had finally arrived, but he had left again. No, he didn’t say where he was going. Perhaps to his apartment. Perhaps to the health club.

Fuad took a taxi back to Jamal’s apartment and checked that area once again for cars. New cars had arrived, dozens of them. Especially Mercedes. He glared at them, hating them—every car an enemy, every one a potential killer. There were too many cars to check. He had already checked Verdun once. What about the health club?

Fuad was feeling increasingly desperate. He made his way along Rue Abdallah al-Sabbah, toward the health club. He passed the cars in a run so that they seemed almost a blur. Pedestrians stopped to look at him. People do not run in the streets in Beirut unless something is wrong. A policeman stopped him and asked to see his papers. Fuad had to give him 20 Lebanese pounds and invoke the name of the head of the Sûreté before the policeman let him go. He was losing time. The clock was ticking. There was nothing on Rue Abdallah either.

Where, then?

Shit, thought Fuad. What does Jamal do in the morning, on days when he has been out the previous night? He goes first to the office, to inquire about business, then to his apartment to sleep, to change clothes, to see his wife. My God! It must be Rue Verdun!

Fuad looked for a taxi. He waited. No taxis. Where were they all? Finally one appeared. It already had a passenger, but he flagged it down anyway. The driver said he was going to Corniche Mazraa. Verdun! shouted Fuad. The driver said he would let him off at the bottom of the street.

“Y’allah!” said Fuad. Let’s go.

When they got to Verdun, the driver wanted to haggle over the fare. Fuad threw a ten-pound note at him and began running up Rue Verdun, looking at more newly arrived Mercedes, Fords, and Volkswagens. His head was spinning. He passed Rue Bechir Qassar, Rue Anis Nsouli, Rue Hassan Kamel. Shit! Where is the car? Where is the car? The road curved right, past Rue Habib Srour, past Rue Nobel. He was nearing Jamal’s apartment. It was a quarter-mile away. He was running along the sidewalk, head down, looking at license plates, when he heard a loud honking noise. He ignored it at first and turned his head finally just as the car was passing at high speed, trailed by a Land-Rover full of armed men.

It was Jamal’s Chevrolet, honking other cars out of the way, racing up the street toward his apartment. Fuad heard the roar of the engine and the din of the horn. He screamed as loud as he could but the car was gone.

Fuad stopped dead in his tracks and held his breath. He counted ten seconds. Then fifteen.

Then he heard the explosion, several blocks away. A crack and then a rumble like thunder in his ears, echoing through the crowded streets. Then the screaming of so many people and the wailing of sirens.

Fuad sat down in the street and sobbed.

It was a large and well-designed bomb, detonated by remote control, containing the equivalent of 50 kilos of TNT. The explosion was very powerful, even by Beirut standards. It killed twelve people and injured seventeen.

Fuad eventually got up off the street and went back to his hotel. He could not bear to pass near the scene of the bombing. The Verdun area was swarming with people now. Fatah security men, policemen, Lebanese security men, journalists, curious thrillseekers. Fuad wanted to be anywhere else. He stayed in his room and closed the curtains so that it was dark at midday.

When the radio announced several hours later that Jamal Ramlawi had died on his way to the hospital, Fuad slashed his wrist. He watched it bleed for ten minutes and then applied a tourniquet. Even his grief was useless.

London; 1984

Fuad survived the anguish of that first car bombing. But Rogers’s death in the embassy bombing four years later broke his spirit. Fuad decided then that he had seen enough of Lebanon—and enough of the Americans—and moved to London. The agency offered him a handsome settlement, asked him to sign a contract pledging eternal silence about his intelligence activities, and then wished him well. It was easy enough to let Fuad go. Other than Rogers, no one had ever really known him.

Fuad bought himself a flat in London, in a modern building north of Hyde Park called the Pentangle. It was an odd neighborhood, once the home of the prostitutes who serviced the gentlemen who lived south of the Park. Now it was composed almost entirely of foreigners. Saudis, Nigerians, Iranians, Lebanese, Kuwaitis, Venezualans. A modern class of whores. People who had made money abroad and, for whatever reason, had found it prudent to settle down in London. Fuad loved the neighborhood. It was the perfect place to hide.

Fuad bought himself a dog, an enthusiastic Yorkshire terrier, which he liked to take on walks in the park. And as he took these walks, out in the open spaces of London, he turned over in his mind the events he had witnessed in Lebanon, the deaths of Jamal and Rogers and so many thousands more.

The news from Lebanon seemed to get worse, week by week. In October 1983, a truck bomb exploded outside the Marine barracks at the Beirut Airport, killing 241 people. The United States reacted like a wounded Cyclops, bellowing, flailing about, making a loud noise but doing little damage. A World War II battleship lobbed shells the size of Volkswagens at Druse militiamen in the Lebanese mountains. Navy planes dropped iron bombs on Syrian gun positions. This display of firepower did not impress the local warlords. The foreign minister of Syria summed up the local sentiment when he remarked that the Americans seemed “short of breath.” In February 1984, to the surprise of no one, the Americans pulled up their tents and fled from Lebanon, leaving a situation far messier—and infinitely greater in human misery—than when they had first begun to play the role of benevolent proconsul several decades before.

One day, when Fuad had been in London nearly a year, he walked into an electronics shop on the Edgware Road and bought himself a tape recorder. He took it back to his apartment and began dictating a message for the one American to whom he felt he owed an explanation—Frank Hoffman, the man who had first spotted him, recruited him, and introduced him to Tom Rogers. He recorded many different versions of the message, and finally settled on one that said most of what he felt. He sent it to Hoffman in Saudi Arabia.

When Hoffman received the tape, he listened to it once, had his secretary transcribe it, and then destroyed it. It did no one any good. He sent the transcript to Edward Stone in Washington. The transcript read as follows:

“Effendi:

“I have been trying for a very long time to understand what went wrong for my friends the Americans in Lebanon. Now I see a part of the story, and I think I should tell you. It is hard for Arabs to talk plainly and honestly. Usually we do the opposite. But I will try.

“I will begin by telling you a proverb that I told my friend Tom Rogers the morning before he died, when we had breakfast together. It is a
hadith
, a saying of the Prophet Mohammed, and it is as follows:

“A simple Bedouin in the desert asks the Prophet: ‘Should I let my camel loose and trust in God?’

“ ‘No,’ says the Prophet. ‘Tie down your camel and trust in God.’

“That
hadith
expresses what we Arabs understand and you do not. Promises and good intentions are less than nothing. This is a land of liars. Do you perhaps understand the meaning of this proverb, Mr. Hoffman? I want to think that Rogers did, but I am not sure. With Rogers, I always thought he understood everything, until later, when I began to think back, I was not so sure. When I told him the
hadith
about tying down the camel that morning in Beirut, he said, ‘Trust us.’ But I think that was the problem. Look what happened. He is dead.

“What I think I have learned, Mr. Hoffman, is something about the United States. At first, after Rogers was killed, I thought that all of you were incompetent. But now I realize that it is more complicated than that.

“I will try to explain. When you first met me, I was in love with America. I was only twenty. America is an easy country to fall in love with at that age. When we are twenty, we think that anything is possible, and we don’t worry about failing because we will always have a second chance. That was what seemed so liberating about America—that sense of possibility—but perhaps I was just in love with being young.

“Was there ever anyone easier to recruit than me, Mr. Hoffman? I recruited myself. And I have never regretted working for you. Not even for one day. I know that many Arabs criticize you now, but I am not one of them. The agency was the part of America that I liked the best, the part that understood the way the world is. It is easy to have the ideals of a twenty-year-old, but you need the cunning of a fifty-year-old to achieve them. When I met you and Mr. Rogers, I thought, Maybe there is a chance. Maybe these Americans have the toughness. I thought: These men are cynical enough to do good. And that was when I began to think that America truly could liberate the Arab world.

“I was wrong. Americans are not hard men. Even the CIA has a soft heart. You want so much to achieve good and make the world better, but you do not have the stomach for it. And you do not know your limitations. You are innocence itself. You are the agents of innocence. That is why you make so much mischief. You come into a place like Lebanon as if you were missionaries. You convince people to put aside their old customs and allegiances and to break the bonds that hold the country together. With your money and your schools and your cigarettes and music, you convince us that we can be like you. But we can’t. And when the real trouble begins, you are gone. And you leave your friends, the ones who trusted you most, to die.

“I will tell you what it is. You urge us to open up the windows of heaven. But you do not realize that the downpour will come rushing through and drown us all.

“I have been thinking about why Jamal died, and why Rogers died. And I finally realized: They are linked. They are the same story.

“Jamal died because of what I was just saying about America. You seduce us to work with you, but you are not strong enough to protect us. Jamal said something to me once, which I will always remember. It haunts me now. We were having an argument about working for the Americans. He told me that I shouldn’t trust the Americans, because they would never truly love the Arabs. I told him he was wrong. Rogers and the agency were sincere, I said.

“Jamal answered me: ‘You are right. America loves us. But it is the love of a man for his mistress. We are fun for a night. Maybe for a whole month. But do not ever forget that this man America is married to someone else, and he will always go back to his wife in the end.’ And who is this wife? I said. But I knew the answer. The wife is Israel. And that is what killed Jamal. The wife got jealous and killed the mistress.

“We really are such fools, we Arabs. We really deserve what we get from you. That is why I cannot complain too much. It is our own fault.

“I thought that Mr. Rogers would live forever. I loved him as if he was my own brother, and when he died, the part of me that had hope also died. I could not work for anyone else. So I tried to understand what killed him.

“One answer is easy. He was killed by the thing that he was trying to stop. There was a disease of terrorism that began to infect this country about the time he came to Lebanon. He saw it. He understood how dangerous it was. He told me so many times. He knew that people were learning how to make little bombs, then big bombs, then car bombs. I would not even be surprised if he had once known, somewhere, the very man who made the bomb that killed him. Lebanon is a small country, and Mr. Rogers knew everyone. The people who paid for the bomb were probably Iranians. But they had caught the disease from Lebanon. That is where it began. Even the Iranians come to Lebanon to fight their wars.

“So maybe what killed Rogers was that he was unlucky. He saw the debris falling all around him and he forgot to get out of the way.

“But the more I thought about what happened, I decided that something else killed Mr. Rogers. It had to do with Jamal. Perhaps it was a kind of curse.

“You may think that Rogers’s mistake was to lie down with the Devil. I understand what you are thinking. You say that he had a pact with a man who was a terrorist, and that this pact opened the door that let in the wind that blew down the house. If you make a deal with a man whose hands are covered with blood, some of it sticks to you. And if the Americans had not helped Jamal, maybe Lebanon would have survived the disease. Maybe the civil war would not have come and destroyed the country, setting loose all the madmen. I know what you are saying, but you are wrong.

“The truth is very simple, Mr. Hoffman. So simple that it took me many months to see it. It is this: The only man on earth who could have saved Tom Rogers that day at the embassy was Jamal Ramlawi. He was the only person the Americans had ever known in Lebanon who could have penetrated the terrorist cell, learned of the plot, and stopped the car with the bomb before it reached the embassy. But Jamal Ramlawi was dead, and there was no one else to save Tom Rogers.

“Now you know what I know.

“Effendi:

“Do you know what I just heard on the radio? It is a report from Lebanon. The radio says that the Lebanese Christians have decided that they need an ally against the Syrians. So they are allowing the Palestinian fighters to come back into Lebanon, to fight against the Syrians. Can you imagine this? We fought a war for ten years, Christians and Moslems—we killed 100,000 people—because the Christians believed that it was necessary to push the Palestinian fighters out of Lebanon forever. And now they want them to come back!

“So now we know what this war was about, Mr. Hoffman. It was about nothing.”